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Friday, January 5, 2018

I Wish I'd Written This

THE BOY WHO LOVES BLUE

hunts sapphire dragonflies along the creek
and searches for the turtle blue as sea.
He knows a string of stories, azure beads
be-speckled with the dust of every land;
so many fables, all of them quite true
in a young boy’s mind, vibrant as a week
of Saturdays. He weighs each one against
the facts he learns and tries to understand
at school. But every lesson that he reads
denies that there’s a lamb with cobalt eyes
who dares to walk among the wildest beasts.
This boy would hold blue heaven in his hand,
adventuring the way that larkspur leads
and loving sky-blue wind upon his cheek.

Taylor Graham

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the California Sierra and serves as El Dorado County’s first poet laureate.

She’s been writing and publishing poems for over forty years, online and in print, including The Iowa Review, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and the anthologies California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara Univ) and Villanelles (Everyman’s Library, London).

Books include What the Wind Says (2013), poems about her forty-plus years of living, training, and searching with German Shepherd dogs; Walking with Elihu: poems on Elihu Burritt, the Learned Blacksmith (2010), and Uplift (2016). Much of her poetry is nature-oriented with a sense of the bond between humanity and other living creatures.

She frequently shares her poetry at Robert Lee Brewer's Poetic Asides Blog, a division of Writer's Digest, where I sometimes participate too. It's always lovely work and she frequently wins or is placed in the various 'challenges' Robert runs at Poetic Asides.

This gorgeous sonnet particularly caught my imagination, for both its beauty and its message. I think it can speak for itself without any further words from me.

Material shared in 'I Wish I'd
Written This' is presented for study and review. Poems, photos and other
writings remain the property of the copyright owners, usually their authors.

Such a beautiful poem. I can see the face of that boy who loves blue. I love the poet's line of work, lovely to spend all those years with dogs. I will have to check out poems she wrote about them. Nice that she is a poet laureate. Did i tell you that tiny Tofino, of 1500 souls, will have its own poet laureate this year? Rosemary, you always bring us interesting poets. Thank you for all you do.

Thank you for introducing me to Taylor Graham, Rosemary. I had never come across her before but will be looking her up.I love the way she explores the different kinds of blue through the boy's eyes and especially the lines: 'He knows a string of stories, azure beadsbe-speckled with the dust of every land;so many fables, all of them quite true'and'This boy would hold blue heaven in his hand,adventuring the way that larkspur leads'

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